I think that it's awesome that you ask the community what they want for the survey - but please consider asking fewer questions than last year. It took me 30 minutes to complete last years survey (as compared to previous years where it took 5-10 minutes)
– DanielNov 1 '18 at 19:13

4

@Daniel It was the exact opposite from my experience. I personally like to give detailed answers to a survey and 5 - 10 minutes is way to short to give enough meaningful data considering the details in evaluations we get in the survey results.
– FilnorNov 2 '18 at 9:26

But cutting of the people who do not want to take part on such a long survey, doesn't help in meaningful data either. @Filnor Imo 30 minutes is still optimistic for non native speakers.
– Christian GollhardtNov 2 '18 at 12:09

I would like to see a graph for Salary and Experience by Region / Location
– oblNov 2 '18 at 18:33

We can ask another question like "Do you work on side-projects (start-up ideas) when you already have a full-time job? "
– VineelNov 4 '18 at 16:51

Another interesting question will be "Do you practice coding questions when you are trying to change job and attending an interview ? or do you just just go and give the interview with-out preparing because you are already working on it at a day job?"
– VineelNov 4 '18 at 16:53

3

Should this question be closed since we're past the Friday deadline?
– BSMPNov 4 '18 at 18:40

@BSMP that, or locked as "answers are a community effort".
– Stephen LeppikNov 5 '18 at 16:40

@ChristianGollhardt: …. because it is past Friday, Nov. 2? (Boldness sic the original post; see the bottom line.) Unless you want to believe it's due for November 2019? It does not look as if you can keep adding topic suggestions right until the survey starts.
– usr2564301Nov 26 '18 at 12:30

Why close? I find the links interesting and information is very helpful. Closing would be hiding and destruction of invested information.
– Pauli Sudarshan TerhoMay 7 at 9:19

76 Answers
76

Combine this answer with salary reports for better insights into how much each position's time is worth.

A $137,000/yr Engineering Manager position may look rosy from the perspective of a $100,000/yr Full-Stack Developer, but if you couple those salary reports with 60 hrs/wk and 40 hrs/wk, respectively, it paints a different picture.

I'd also like to see this broken down further: how much do you work at your "day" job, how much do you work for "extra" projects at work, how much do you work on personal projects in your spare time?
– Kevin WorkmanOct 30 '18 at 16:24

5

@KevinWorkman I don't understand the distinction between "extra" projects at work and your "day" job. If you are working on something at your job, that's your job; there is no "extra". I think almost all job descriptions in modern office environments include the rider "and other duties as assigned"; while it's true I would not be reasonably expected to replace light bulbs or interact with customers as a programmer at my job, any programming related tasks I might work on would 100% be considered "doing my job".
– TylerHOct 31 '18 at 13:53

Second - I feel this will have strong correlation with some other interesting metrics.
– vektorOct 30 '18 at 5:05

23

Good question, but I think clarification is needed on what constitutes learning to program. In my case there was a long gap between being able to write a simple loop/hello world in QBASIC, and being able to write a useful application in C#.
– AndyJOct 30 '18 at 10:40

2

@AndyJ Maybe a two-part question would help provide that clarification? E.g. "At what age did you complete your first programming project? What was it?" With a list of options: website, embedded system, video game, utility script, etc.
– Jake ReeceOct 30 '18 at 11:51

1

A bit unfair question for non-milleniums (me including). There were little to no computers in the world until ~1990 when I was already 10. My nephew plays game from 1.5. And then what is exactly first program? Hello world is enough? Should it be compiled? Is modifying someone js script (or even html page) counts?
– SinatrOct 30 '18 at 16:16

@JakeReece A video game would be an impressive first project :) Where is the hello world option? haha
– chevybowOct 30 '18 at 16:36

1

@chevybow actually a lot of kids make video games as a first project. Usually either only "games" by some stretch of the word, or crappy snowclones of some game they like, but yeah.
– Stephen LeppikOct 30 '18 at 16:40

@Sinatr IBM PCs first came out in 1981. And they weren't the first home/office computers. "Home Computers" were available from 1977. In the UK many schools would have had BBC Computers by the time you started school. When analyzing the results of the surveys the results are often grouped by geographical location, to account for things like availability of hardware.
– AndyJOct 31 '18 at 15:03

Maybe with options: Yes, it's required / Yes because the developers do it on their own / No
– nvoigtOct 30 '18 at 9:15

yeah. everyone in the whole industry pretend like they care but never allot user-story points to it. And they don't really get mad at you when it's not done either because they obviously know it would be ridiculous given they themselves never allow time for it. As a front-end dev testing is particularly ignored and I've started to just get used to it, but maybe I shouldn't be?
– tatsuOct 30 '18 at 9:26

3

Over the whole range of programming - from web GUIs to embedded real-time systems - how, when and why you test becomes very domain-specific. So I don't find this particularly interesting, as there is nothing to be learned. Should I answer "Yeah I always design tests on dedicated pins for my real-time requirements, form a PWM corresponding to each tasks' individual time and measure them with an oscilloscope". After which the web guys go "huh, wut...?" And they are likely as little interested in knowing this, as I am in knowing how they test their web stuff.
– LundinOct 30 '18 at 13:04

3

@Lundin eh, automated tests are pretty universally applicable. At least I know a lot of devs who don't have the time budget to reliably do these, so I'd like to know how prevalent that is
– MagischOct 30 '18 at 13:13

3

@Magisch Automated tests in embedded typically means designing a test interface out from the board, and/or a special test firmware in place of the production firmware and/or a test rig where the PCB can be mounted and connected to probes. What part of it is universally applicable?
– LundinOct 30 '18 at 13:45

@Lundin by mostly universally applicable I meant in non embedded programming, which is most programming. Sure there are different frameworks and systems for automating tests, but on a fundamental level, doing or not doing automated tests is a important distinction, imo
– MagischOct 30 '18 at 13:46

Not sure how I would answer this question if it appeared on a survey. Internal teams at my company (like mine) don't unit test. Client facing ones do. I guess technically that means my company employs unit testing but its not as if every developer is writing tests for all their code
– chevybowOct 30 '18 at 16:39

I like to phrase this question, "What testing framework do you use?" The only wrong answer is "None."
– S JadeOct 31 '18 at 3:57

Interesting question, only because I would have to first look up what unit testing is before I can be sure my answer is "no".
– TylerHOct 31 '18 at 13:50

1

@Lundin I don't get how the exact implementation of automated/unit testing matters. The question is yes/no, are you doing them or not. Sure, there's going to be some trends with industry, but there's still plenty of embedded unit testing frameworks...
– mbrigNov 1 '18 at 21:39

I think a very interesting follow-up question would be If no, why? with options such as No time budgeted for it, Boss does not believe it is needed, Developers do not believe it is needed or something like that.
– fgblomqvistNov 2 '18 at 14:25

Do you feel the "Welcoming" initiative improves the experience of more experienced users?

Does Stack Overflow do enough to welcome novices, too little or too much?

I feel welcome on Stack Overflow (with a likert scale)

Has the welcoming initiative improved your experience?

Has the welcoming initiative worsened your experience?

I'm not great at coming up with the specific questions, but the idea is that we should take the temperature of the conversation happening now. It would be interesting to compare answers to these questions along account age, reputation, or other factors.

Addition: Do you see any improvements after the welcome-wagon measures?
– Amit JoshiOct 30 '18 at 8:27

yes! great one! Stack can't pretend it's system isn't directly the cause for this behavior. And of course they didn't mean for it to be this way but it just takes a tiny bit of thinking and you can forecast that this was the only logical emergent behavior these set of mechanics and rules could bear. In my mind the points system lean heavily on rank and power, authority. Also edits and duplicate weeding. Through this, you lower the time spent on an interaction you lower it's quality. people don't read, jump to conclusions and voila! a false duplicate flag. downvotes are also a bad idea.
– tatsuOct 30 '18 at 9:59

22

"Do you feel the "Welcoming" initiative improves the experience of more experienced users?" I often feel like the regulars are completely ignored in favor of being "welcoming".
– CerbrusOct 30 '18 at 11:03

1

The same questions about Open Source: Open Source has exactly the same problems that Stack Overflow has (for the same reasons.. ).
– MarcoOct 30 '18 at 11:17

4

I think this question should be asked more neutrally. E.g. "Does Stack Overflow do enough to welcome novices, too little or too much?"
– S.L. BarthOct 30 '18 at 13:11

@S.L.Barth there's no way you can ask about people sentiment without sounding bad or biased ("novices" to what? SO, programming, life?)
– BraiamOct 30 '18 at 16:00

@Braiam Maybe, but we should at least strive for the most neutral wording. Especially when the issue is so sensitive as the Welcoming initiative.
– S.L. BarthOct 30 '18 at 16:05

@tatsu Thanks for the feedback. I don't want to turn this into a debate about the welcoming initiatives though, so I encourage you to comment on one of the threads discussing it.
– Kevin WorkmanOct 30 '18 at 16:22

Your welcoming question will be more in line with survey best practices if it is worded positively: "I feel welcome on Stack Overflow" (with a likert scale). Also, it is better to ask respondents about themselves, rather than about someone else (has the welcoming initiative improved your experience, rather than "is it good for novices, is it good for experienced users")
– De NovoOct 30 '18 at 18:24

2

To be clear, re: a positive welcoming statement, you need to balance it out with a negative one as well, but you should avoid making respondents untangle a double negative ("I disagree with being made to feel unwelcome").
– De NovoOct 31 '18 at 16:07

1

This was the first thing I thought of. To be useful, the survey needs to focus as much (or more) on how the "welcoming initiative" has actually impacted users, both new and old. SO has already decided the answer to the "do you feel welcome" question - now we need to tell SO what effect the "welcoming initiative" has had.
– BJ MyersOct 31 '18 at 18:44

3

@BJMyers "SO has already decided the answer to the 'do you feel welcome' question". It was an interpretation of the 'part of the community' question, and absolutely needs further questions. For one, it was quite interesting to see "minorities and women don't feel like they're part of the community" interpreted as "inexperienced people don't feel welcome". Why jump from women and minorities to "those people who don't know how to code"? It DEFINITELY needs further questions. The curve of "feeling like part of the community" vs. experience actually goes down as women go from early to mid career
– De NovoNov 1 '18 at 16:46

@Mureinik And how do we count it when one interruption interrupts another interruption? Possibly as a result of Imperious Interuptus.
– Davy MOct 30 '18 at 16:56

How many interrupts do I have on a daily basis? Hmm... I think about 256 but I'm pretty sure the OS takes all of them. So zero? (I think you might want to reword that to "how often are you interrupted daily at work" or something like that)
– jrhOct 31 '18 at 2:15

I'd be interested to see how this correlates with years at your current position. I find I get interrupted more often as my responsibilities within a company increase over time.
– BobbyANov 1 '18 at 16:19

How many work interruptions do you experience on a daily basis? All of them! Just hang a sign that states: "Positive Feedback In Use. Do Not Perturb!"
– HABONov 4 '18 at 23:43

When you work in a team, which project management methodology is used?

Chaos (I will know what to do when the boss comes in and tells me)

Ticket-Driven (something gets assigned to me and I do it)

Traditional (I have a one-directional process where I have documented requirements to work on, with project managers and change requests. For example Waterfall or V-Model)

Scrum (by the book. Really.)

"Scrum" (implemented some parts of Scrum, but not all.)

Another form of Agile (for example Kanban or Extreme Programming)

Other

I don't work in teams.

I noticed the question came up in 2018 already. But it seems very binary. With two thirds saying they do Scrum, I cannot believe they all did Scrum by the book. Reading though the workplace and project management I simply cannot believe this number. I would be interested in how many actually do Scrum by the book and how many do "Scrum" in name only.

@jrh That sounds like that guy never did Scrum right. For most of his criticism he doesn't even have an alternative. It's hard to estimate a task, and Scrum does that. Yeah, duh. What's the alternative? Not doing it? That's a lot of moaning and complaining and yet not a single constructive thought other than "let me do my thing". Newsflash: that's not how you work if you have more than a mom-and-pop shop.
– nvoigtOct 31 '18 at 7:21

@nvoigt I was mostly referring to this paragraph where Uncle Bob himself talks about how Scrum has been misinterpreted.
– jrhOct 31 '18 at 12:40

I've got opinions on Scrum and that article (there's business needs and efficiency issues to weigh out on both sides) but this probably isn't the place for that. I'll just say I wouldn't be surprised at all if a lot of shops claiming "Scrum" methodologies have the same problems the writer of that article had, or worse, even if the tech leads were properly trained and they had the best of intentions. Certain tensions come about while working (from above, or from other places) and not everyone is willing or able to die on certain hills forever, for better or for worse.
– jrhOct 31 '18 at 12:54

I like it when we call the "Scrum" category: "ScrumBut" = "its Scrum but..."
– JTechNov 1 '18 at 5:48

I added a question related to this question : How do you feel you are doing implementing it? Some companies poorly implement what they advertise..
– YeikelNov 2 '18 at 20:54

How many hours of sleep you get every night? My sleep patterns are so erratic that it's kind of difficult to answer. It varies a lot depending on if there's something due the next day or not, and whether I'm on a work term (in which case my schedule is more regular) or a study term (more freedom + more random sleep schedule shifts). Also, sometimes my sleep is spread out over multiple naps throughout the day.
– ahiijnyNov 1 '18 at 2:09

How much sleep I get is directly correlated with how well my children sleep (one suffers from night terrors). It has nothing to do with the job :)
– Binary WorrierNov 26 '18 at 17:36

Not everyone uses open-source libraries, and it would also seriously depend on the bug and the library.
– Stephen LeppikOct 29 '18 at 18:58

2

This was more of a tongue-in-cheek question to gauge attitudes of developers towards the tech stack they use - are they merely consumers, or do they activeily participate in it. I've added a fourth option ("I don't use open source"), but TBH, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a developer that doesn't use at least one open source componenet somewhere, be it in the production code, the testing code, the toolchain around the build process, etc.
– MureinikOct 29 '18 at 19:23

"Listening to (my own collection of) music". I my experience, it's significantly different from listening to the radio.
– CerbrusOct 30 '18 at 10:49

I'm now wondering of the podcast item should be it's own question. I'll add an answer and see if gets any interest.
– DavidGOct 30 '18 at 11:03

1

@DavidG asking which podcasts you listen to? It would have my vote.
– reneOct 30 '18 at 11:16

@rene Since there's a bazillion of them, I've limited it to category but I'd be super interested in the actual podcasts people are consuming.
– DavidGOct 30 '18 at 11:17

2

Isn't it either "listen to radio/music" or "listen to other passengers loudly broadcasting intimate details of their personal life"? Which in turn means there's a popular option missing: "loud, braindead conversations with my partner or best friend over phone".
– LundinOct 30 '18 at 13:09

1

@nvoigt Not everyone commutes by a vehicle they drive/etc. If you're using mass transit, or are a passenger in a vehicle being driven by someone else (car pool, lyft, etc) your options for spending the time are a lot more diverse. This question might benefit from being paired with a "how do you commute" one.
– Dan NeelyOct 30 '18 at 15:18

1

@DanNeely I am aware of that and I did not ask for removing any option. It was just very centered on public transport and it's more broad now.
– nvoigtOct 30 '18 at 15:20

@Lundin I think asking developers to qualify themselves if they are braindead (conversation wise) is in conflict with the former be nice policy and the current CoC. I added the listen to option though as that fits my sense of humor ...
– reneOct 30 '18 at 16:53

@StephenLeppik I remember started filling it out, then had to leave the computer because it just took too long. Then when I had time for it, I had to start over. I would imagine this is a common situation and when that happens, most people would just go "ok screw this survey".
– LundinOct 30 '18 at 14:35

25

Maybe if they had a checkpoint where after 8 minutes, the basic survey was done and sent, but you could continue the extended survey for another 22 minutes?
– BlackVegetableOct 30 '18 at 16:21

8

Drop all US-specific things like "benefits: health insurance" Not all companies offer all types of benefits anyway. If they were to limit benefits questions to only those offered by all companies globally, the list would be empty.
– BSMPOct 30 '18 at 17:32

1

@Lundin: Suggested Edit: - Please add some sort of progress indicator on every page showing how much is done and how much is remaining. - Cover all important question (cannot suggest the criteria to define 'important') first. - There should be an option/way to skip entire page/section. I know there is already an option to "not answering"/"skip this question".
– Amit JoshiOct 31 '18 at 6:18

5

Agree with @BlackVegetable. The survey should be divided in sections. There should be commit point after each section. This will help to complete the survey in steps.
– Amit JoshiOct 31 '18 at 6:21

4

Don't agree on the length point (I have hours to waste during work time), but definitely on the US-centricity. If you don't already, then getting the survey reviewed by people all around the world would be good, before publishing.
– DaveyDaveDaveOct 31 '18 at 12:07

@AmitJoshi They used to have an indicator before the survey became dynamic. Now that which questions you're shown depends on your answers, that's harder to do. Also, I they are probably worried that doing, "1/N possible questions" would scare people off, especially if it's impossible for any one person to end up seeing all N questions. They could update the total number as you go but that would probably be confusing.
– BSMPNov 1 '18 at 4:40

I'd prefer to rephrase this slightly; there may be sites which are not specifically programming or Q&A sites but on which programming questions could be asked. So more like: "Do you read, ask, or answer programming questions on sites aside from Stack Overflow?"
– JustinOct 29 '18 at 20:12

1

@Justin that wording does seem better. Added it to the answer.
– Davis BrodaOct 29 '18 at 20:16

@Justin Like on BodyBuilding.com forums. That's where I used get all of my programming help before SO. /s
– pushkinOct 31 '18 at 21:21

Was there a reasonable criterion in the selection of those 5 languages? There are not more Japanese speakers in the world than there are, for instance, Portuguese speakers.
– E_net4Oct 30 '18 at 11:03

7

I know a lot of people who think they're fluent in English and actually aren't. :/
– MarcoOct 30 '18 at 11:19

2

For this to have any relevance, you would have to compare programmers from country x, with average people from country x. And so you would have to make a second survey for non-programmers.
– LundinOct 30 '18 at 13:32

1

It would be interesting to know the fraction of users of the other-language Stack Overflow sites who also speak English. I don't think there are any plans to translate the survey, but a simple one-question survey specifically for those sites (and that links to the English SO survey if they say they're proficient) would be useful market research (which is, after all, what the survey is about).
– Jeffrey BosboomOct 30 '18 at 18:42

3

Most non-US/UK people are at least bilingual (especially if they're filling in a survey in English). Most US/UK people only speak one language. Developer salaries are highest in the US (as seen in previous surveys). Thus, the conclusion from this will be that you earn more money if you are not bilingual.
– Cris LuengoOct 30 '18 at 20:19

1

@E_net4 absolutely no criteria there at all. I just wanted to list some human languages to make it obvious I wasn't talking about C#, Python, etc.
– JeremyOct 30 '18 at 23:34

@Lundin I'd actually expect this to be fairly widely studied external to SO. For example, the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects data on languages spoken in the home as part of the national census.
– JeremyOct 30 '18 at 23:39

@CrisLuengo part of my motivation here is that I'd like to examine the assumption that "most [anglophone] developers only speak one language". I'm an Australian working in Australia and within my technical team of 8 we have speakers of Mandarin, German, Italian, Polish, Punjabi, Farsi, Hebrew, Spanish, and probably a few more.
– JeremyOct 30 '18 at 23:47

@CrisLuengo also you're quite correct re: the national salary effect. I'm hoping that the stack exchange data scientist folks can solve that one for us.
– JeremyOct 30 '18 at 23:49

3

Adding a caveat like "what languages other than your native language(s) do you speak" could be useful.
– chintogtokhOct 31 '18 at 6:24

@Roberrrt I came up with it when I was thinking about how so many kids are taught drag-and-drop, and never actually realize they'll need to type to be a programmer.
– Redwolf ProgramsNov 5 '18 at 16:43

1

@RedwolfPrograms fixing 100$ visually coded website themes was my primary source of freelance work for a full year when studying.
– RoberrrtNov 5 '18 at 16:48

How many monitors do you use (which makes you feel comfortable)? | I often use 1... but my ideal would be 2 | Do you have personal tech blog to share knowledge? | i'm working on it....
– Steve NosseOct 31 '18 at 14:26

1

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "which makes you feel comfortable"? Can you clarify?
– Jon SchneiderNov 1 '18 at 13:34

1

If we're going to ask this, it might be interesting to capture a longer tail of answers? "How many monitors do you use?" [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6 or more]
– Jon SchneiderNov 1 '18 at 13:35

I think "I don't know/I'm unsure" should also be an option.
– BSMPOct 30 '18 at 19:01

14

Everyone I know (that's a developer) uses Stack Overflow but I have absolutely no idea how many of them have accounts. Somewhat of a weird question, imo.
– chevybowOct 30 '18 at 19:43

2

@chevybow every people that was in my team I knew if they have a SO account or not. I think this question is good to know if most of the developers only use the site and does not have any interest to create an account
– DherikOct 31 '18 at 0:12

Not everyone who participates in the developer survey has an active Stack Overflow account. Some may use other networks primarily or only like taking the survey without participating in the site. It would be better to keep the second to last answer focused by saying "None of them"
– PlutoNov 2 '18 at 0:02

Interesting question, but the phrase "moved due to your job" has many possible interpretations. Some of them are: Moves that stay with the same employer where the old office and job remain open. Moves where the old office closes and the company relocates. Changes of employer to get a better (more money, changed work/life balance, shorter commute, etc) job. Forced job moves due to redundancy or company restructuring.
– AdrianHHHNov 5 '18 at 10:28

I like this. Suggestion: anything related to the company paying for education could possibly be condensed to, "Company offers employees an education budget". I don't believe many companies always "fully" or "partially" pay for college coursework regardless of tuition cost.
– Jake ReeceOct 31 '18 at 14:13

@JakeReece My thinking is that an employer either doesn't pay at all, they pay some, or they pay it all. In my experience, most employers have a tuition re-reimbursement program that is the max allowed to be deducted by the IRS (which would be a partial pay scenario). I think it would be interesting to see how many companies are willing to fully pay for someone's education.
– UnhandledExcepSeanOct 31 '18 at 14:20

Follow up on "part of the community" question

This was mentioned in an earlier answer, but I'd be particularly careful here to use a good set of questions that follow survey best practices, and hit it from a few different angles. E.g., one conclusion was:

The following statements with a likert agree-disagree response could help you learn more about that. Keep the "part of the community" question as a comparison (obviously).

I feel welcome to ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow (or maybe to participate in, rather than to ask and answer questions)

The Stack Overflow community welcomes people like me

This would, on its face, measure your concern (people don't feel welcome), but I'm not a huge fan of the use of the word welcome here. For one, by using the "welcome" word you may be measuring a mix of the actual thing you're trying to measure (whether people feel welcome) and the response of users to a set of new features (the welcoming effort), which you should also be measuring, but more explicitly. In this case, it might be useful to use different phrasing, or slightly adjust what you're trying to measure. This has the added benefit of interrogating why experienced women and minorities don't feel like part of the community (instead of just directing programs and features at inexperienced users). For example, you could use:

The Stack Overflow community values people like me

People value my help when I answer questions on Stack Overflow (with an opt out for haven't answered a question)

People help me when I ask questions on Stack Overflow (with an opt out for haven't asked a question)

These questions would, of course, need to be analyzed by both experience and demographics.

Free response questions could help you generate more specific hypotheses about what makes people feel like they are or aren't part of the community. You could use these to develop better questions for the 2020 developer survey

Follow up on free response items from 2018 survey

Don't let your free answer response items like this one from last year go to waste. Their utility is largely hypothesis generating. Follow this up by developing new specific questions. For example, one hypothesis drawn from a common word analysis was

Developers were largely positive about Stack Overflow, focusing on the helpful nature of the community

Test this with the following three questions, phrased as statements the respondent can agree or disagree with on, e.g., a 5 point Likert scale. These questions can be phrased differently, but the point is to measure the valence of the respondents feelings regarding (1) the helpfulness of community and (2) the site, and (3) more objectively identify whether the respondent was helped. Looking at the concordance/discordance of these responses gives you a strong sense about your strengths and weaknesses here. You might consider tweaking (3) so that, rather than a statement with a likert on agree/disagree, it asks how many times Stack Overflow helped the respondent solve a problem in (time period). Time period should be shorter for this version of the question, and analysis should also involve normalizing by frequency of use (presumably you're asking that question elsewhere).

The Stack Overflow community is helpful

Stack Overflow is a helpful website

Stack Overflow helped me solve a problem at some point in the last year

That's just one example, but generally, it's a good idea to look at hypotheses drawn from whatever analyses were done on the free response questions from last year, pick some important ones, and interrogate them with questions that test those hypotheses.

Interrogate the relationship between the users and the brand, or institution that is SE

There are questions about how respondents relate to the main product (Q&A) and how they relate to each other (community). I would encourage you to also ask questions about how respondents relate to the brand or SE as an entity that produces the product they use. The language here will be in large part determined by your own branding decisions (e.g., you may not want to ask how respondents feel about the SE brand if part of your brand is that you are not a slick, inhuman, corporate entity), so I'm not going to suggest specific wording. Regardless, it will be useful to ask 100,000s of developers about whether they feel SO is responsive, on their side, just wants to make money off of them, is cold and unfeeling, etc. Right now you have a sense of that from recent meta discussions, but these are from orders of magnitude fewer individuals than respond to the developer survey.

I commented elsewhere, but having "don't know" in the Likert scale, specially in this kind of questions, would help figure out the awareness about the sentiment on the questionee.
– BraiamOct 31 '18 at 9:49

1

@Braiam the survey question writers here seem to have a good handle on how to ask these kinds of questions :) I'm just trying to nudge them toward addressing these topics, and mentioning the easy to miss pitfall that specifically asking about "feeling welcome" might measure something other than how welcome respondents feel.
– De NovoOct 31 '18 at 16:12

Yeah, I know. My worries are what interpretation they give to the results, which is derived from these answers. I try to always include the ambivalent response on all instruments I implement.
– BraiamOct 31 '18 at 16:24

@Braiam I'm not entirely sure, but I think last year's survey included a neutral option in likert scales, and the exact wording ("neutral" vs. "unknown" vs. "neither agree nor disagree") doesn't seem to make a difference in responses
– De NovoOct 31 '18 at 16:29

I think there are times when you want a neutral (neither agree nor disagree) response and times when want a don't know response, and they are different. Sometimes you suspect people use those responses to avoid saying what they think because of social acceptability bias.
– ElinNov 4 '18 at 12:36

... and are you able to use those new skills in your work? I have been on a few training courses which where unrelated to the work I was doing and the needs of project I was on.
– AdrianHHHNov 5 '18 at 10:34

My original thinking was more along the lines of trying to get the gist of how much of their time, most developers are learning new stuff in their day-to-day work. Some will be applying their existing knowledge to solve problems, others will be spending a good chunk of their time doing things for the first time with new tools; either learning or refining skills. Some jobs I've spent almost exclusively learning - other jobs I've done lots of debugging but little new tech.
– Peter ScottNov 5 '18 at 12:33

Actually a substancial part of the survey is geared towards commercially-employed developers. But a good question to add.
– AlejandroOct 30 '18 at 16:46

Are you saying that it's only for commercially-employed developers because you assume other developers don't work on projects that have release cycles?
– ElinNov 4 '18 at 12:47

This question seems related to agile methods. Many projects have a long development period before any customer sees anything.
– AdrianHHHNov 5 '18 at 10:38

@AdrianHHH - good point, although I still think this could be interesting information, especially if the responses were compared to those for a question about methodologies that I've seen also suggested here. I'd hope for something like the 'developers who use spaces are paid more' from a couple of years ago - "developers' salaries are inversely proportional to the length of their release cycles", maybe? :D
– DaveyDaveDaveNov 5 '18 at 11:34

I omitted to say that I agree it is an interesting question. But it needs careful writing to cover the differences between agile and long term development methods.
– AdrianHHHNov 5 '18 at 11:38

@AdrianHHH - agreed. I've tried a few times to think of better ways of wording it, but failed every time :) Your (entirely accurate) observation only makes it harder :) Thankfully that's someone else's problem though, if they want to use the question!
– DaveyDaveDaveNov 5 '18 at 11:42

If you are also required to answer the said pager/phone, then that's what's referred to as "on call", and should be compensated.
– danukerNov 3 '18 at 14:34

Where I work the senior devs are, in turns, required to be "on weekend duty". But that's only during the summer time (peak traffic). Maybe it would be good to add some variation to this question like "yes, but only in certain periods"
– Mathieu VIALESNov 26 '18 at 16:02

I think that a question around how the new "be nice to new people" CoC has affected older members of SO (following a question about whether the poster is new or not) - there seems to have been a lot of push-back around the new attitude SO now seems to have regarding what constitutes being rude etc. I would be interested in seeing if this is a vocal minority or a more pressing issue.

Similarly, a question about how newer members have felt since the recent policy changes came into effect would be interesting.

I'd love to know how "Dress Code" policies correlate to the existing questions in the survey.

Perhaps it is more or less likely to be subjected to a smart dress code for particular languages, or in companies that pay more/less? Woudn't it be interesting to discover whether dress code is an indicator for bigger and more important things!